Gore Vidal Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

Gore Vidal
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.

Gore Vidal
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Gore Vidal
Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'... Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln.

Gore Vidal
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

Gore Vidal
Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Gore Vidal
Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.

Gore Vidal
Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

Gore Vidal
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

Gore Vidal
We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers.

Gore Vidal
Is there another word in the English language quite so useful, so hopeful, so truly pregnant as yet?

Gore Vidal
They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Gore Vidal
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

Gore Vidal
The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.

Gore Vidal
Americans are farcical when it comes to force majeure and money!
Two things that they worship.
You can't expect a democracy from a society like this.

Gore Vidal
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

Gore Vidal
Now we have a totalitarian government. And the totalitarian government wants to watch everybody, total surveillance of everyone. They listen to the telephone conversations, they look at your credit cards, they look where you travel. We are totally policed. This is contrary to everything in our Constitution.

Gore Vidal
He will lie even when it is inconvenient: the sign of the true artist.

Gore Vidal
In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.

Gore Vidal
The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes.

Gore Vidal
Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

Gore Vidal
Because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another.

Gore Vidal
Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.

Gore Vidal
Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln's bowels, whose 'frequency,' he tells us, 'cannot be documented.' But, of course, they can. 'Truth-teller' Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called bluemass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence 'wrong.'

Gore Vidal
Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, And another thing: Let us tax all the religions, I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption.

Gore Vidal
It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one us making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory.

Gore Vidal
I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created—the television commercial—and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.

Gore Vidal
Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalising actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrel's delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naïve.

Gore Vidal
The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.

Gore Vidal
There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Gore Vidal